TALKED OF NOTHING IN PARTICULAR

Seasons greetings! This post's poem contains a dialect word local to Runcorn - baggin'. I can find no online definition. In the 1970s when I worked in the chemical industry the common term for the food we brought into work was baggin', so the room you ate your meal in was known as the baggin' room. 

At Castner-Kelner Chemical Works in the 1970s,

the baggin’ room of K-Unit Maintenance,

was not conducive to the reading of great literature.

No thick tomes, with dense plots

and serious titles were to be seen,

for we were not there to broaden our horizons

but to repair broken down machinery.

So we were offered no clues about those books

that may have helped us understand,

why we were there in the first place,

in overalls and educated only to a specific level

that meant we could maintain the unit

but that offered no other possibilities.

So every breaktime we drank tea

and talked of nothing in particular.

The poem is concerned with access to education and how in those days people's opportunities were less. The school I attended was designed to provide the workforce for the factories and manufacturing industries. Opportunities for tertiary education were more limited. This version is a draft. It may make it to a further draft, at the moment I cannot see what to do with it. Time will tell.

On that note I will leave you with a Bob Marley song.

Until next time.